Three Days Before the Shooting ... (199 page)

He lay now on his back, looking up where the bullet-smashed chandelier swung gently back and forth under the impact of its shattering, creating a watery distortion of crystal light which seemed to settle him in a ring of liquid fire. Beyond the pulsing blaze where the roiling darkness grew he was dimly aware of a burst of action. Now he could hear someone shouting far off. Then someone was shouting quite close to his ear, but he could not bring his mind back into any of its familiar grooves. And he recalled one of his formulas: Be gracious and polite to all in private contacts, regardless of approach in public debate: and tried vainly to respond. For now a darkness was growing, moving close to him and he tried to push it away, to fight it, but it pressed relentlessly upon him.

It hurts here and here and there and there
, his mind went on through the rising pain.
Lord, Lord, why—Ha! Turn it, crank it! Who? Ha! Inevitable. Focus in scene. There, Reverend Hickman, you? Donelson! Karp! Get this action—from this angle
.

Rise up on that morning, Bliss. On that great gitting up morning, Bliss? BLISS! NO! … No!

But Bliss be the tie that binds us to … No! Denied! Rejected!

Then for an instant he felt himself being lifted, as upon a bright red wave of pain. He did not know if it were man or darkness now, nor if he were awake or dreaming. He had entered a region of darks and greys that revolved slowly before his eyes, and yet there was the unyielding darkness which seemed to speak to him and which he wanted to touch but could not manage and whose words he dreaded to hear.
It hurts here
, he thought.
The light comes and goes behind my eyes—in—out—out—in. Shadowless … If only the throbbing would stop. Who—what—why—Lord, Lord, why hast Thou … It pains above, Lord, Lord, why?

Then someone was calling to him from a long way off, “Senator Sunraider, do you hear me?”

And yes he did, very clearly: yet when he tried to answer he seemed to dream, or to remember a dream, to recall to himself a dream.

II
[Undated, likely the 1960s]

Now through the lilt and tear of his soaring voice the Senator became aware of the visitors staring down. Looking up past the chandelier to the gallery he could feel them there
en masse
, seeming suddenly to impose their presence upon his attention as, dressed in the light suits and colorful dresses of spring, they loomed in serried tiers arising above the curving sweep of balcony emblazoned with
eagle, flag and seal emblematic of Nationhood. They sat bending slightly forward, caught in the tense attitudes of viewers intrigued by some enigmatic action slowly unfolding on a screen observed from the tortured angle of a theatre peanut gallery. Anonymous from where the Senator stood on the podium, the lectern before him, they seemed for a moment to hover high there in rapt suspension of breath, as though awaiting the fulfillment of revelations already emerging from the now accelerating rhythms, the bounce and boom of words sent flighting across the domed and lucid space from the flex and play of his own throat, tongue and diaphragm.

Pleasurably challenged by their engrossment, the Senator experienced a sudden surge of that gaiety, anguished yet wildly free, which sometimes seized him during a speech, and now as with a smooth shifting of emotional gears he felt himself moving beyond a regard for the mere rhetorical rightness of his words onto that plane of verbal exhilaration for which he was famous and in the gay capriciousness of his virtuosity found himself attempting to equal that feat glorified in senatorial legend whereby through a single flourish of his resonantly projected voice the speaker raises both floor and gallery to fever pitch and shatters the building’s window panes
… Do that
, the Senator thought,
and the day is made: so much so that without yelling a single dissenting, “Hell, naw!” the gentlemen from Little Rock will call for changing the name of Arkansaw…

“I would remind you,” the Senator continued, projecting his voice toward the visitor’s gallery, “that every hour on the quarter hour, we are interrogated by our conduct and by our lives. By our stated ideals and by those things which we do and do
not
do. Yes, and by the examples of those, humble and illustrious alike, who came upon the scene before us. So note this well: In this our great land,
memory
is
all
!
Memory
is all: touchstone, threat, and guiding star! Where we go is where we have been! Where we have been is where we shall go….”

The Senator paused, his eyes sweeping the anonymous faces above.

“Therefore,” he continued, “we must confront forthrightly our national complexity, for great nations live out their own mysteries, evolve in their own most intimate secrets. Thus it is that we must remember so that we may forget
—and
we must forget the past so that we may be free to reassemble its remnants in the glowing design of a more human presence and future. To some this appears too difficult, to others it is too optimistic, but we must not pale before the arduous knowledge which holds that those who reject the lessons of history are doomed to repeat its disasters. For this is true only for those who reject the obligation of bringing forth some finer, some more graceful design, some more generous structure to supplant the inadequate institutions of the past. We become victims of history only if we fail to evolve ways of life that are more free, more transcendent! Only if we fail in the task of creating a way of life which allows each of us to soar, released in human space!

“And this too note well! In this land, to remember is to forget, and to forget is to remember
—creative-ly!

“For in this land to create is to
destroy
, and to destroy, if we will it so, if we pay our proper respect to remembered things, is to create a more human future! So let us not falter before our complexity, let us not become confused by the double stroke of our national imperatives, nor equivocate before our national ambiguities! Instead, let us forge ahead in faith and in confidence. For it is not our fate to be mere victims of history—Oh, no! Even the wildest black man in a Cadillac knows—bear me out—perhaps this is the secret of his wildness, his defiance before the harsh laws of economics—who knows? But one mystery at a time, I say, so let us remind ourselves that ours is not the role of passive slaves to the past. Ours is the freedom and obligation to be the fearless creators of ourselves, the
re-
constructors of the world! So let the doubters doubt, the faint of heart turn pale. We’ll fulfill our nation’s need for citizens possessing a multiplicity of creative styles. We’ll supply its need for
individuals
possessing the highest quality of personal stamina, daring and grace—

‘Ho! Build thee more stately mansions,
Oh, my soul’—Yes!

For
we,”
the Senator paused, “are,” his arms reaching out in all-embracing gesture,
“A-meri-cans!”

And it was now, listening to his voice become lost in the explosion of applause accented here and there by rebel yells, the Senator became aware of the rising man….

Up in the front row center of the visitor’s gallery the man was pointing across the guardrail now as though about to utter a denunciation, and the Senator thought
Oh, sit down or leave, only spare us futile gestures. I always lose a few, the old, the short-attention-spanned, mamas’ boys answering mother nature’s call—but use your ears! Most I hold hard, so what can you hope to do…?
Then as he lowered his eyes to the faces of those applauding on the floor below him, the Senator was only dimly aware of the abrupt rise and fall of the man’s still pointing arm as a sound of ringing, erupting above, triggered a prismatic turbulence of the light—through which fragments of crystal, fine and fleeting as the first cool-touching flakes of the fall of snow, had begun to shower down upon him, striking sleet-sharp upon the still upturned palms of his gesturing hands.

My god
, the Senator thought,
it’s the chandelier! I’ve shattered the chandelier!
Whereupon something smashed into the lectern, driving it against him; and now hearing a dry popping sounding above he felt a vicious stinging in his right shoulder and as he stared through the chaotic refraction of the light toward the gallery he could see the sharp kick of the man’s pointing arm and felt a second flare of pain, in his left thigh this time, and was thrown into a state of dream-like lucidity.

Realizing quite clearly that the man was firing toward the floor, he tried desperately to move away, asking himself as he tried to keep the lectern before him,
Is it me? Am I his target?
Then something struck his hip with the force of a well-aimed club and he felt the lectern toppling forward as he was spun around to face the gallery. Coughing and staggering backwards now, he felt himself striking against a chair and lurching forward as he marked the sinister
pzap! pzap! pzap!
of the weapon.

I’m going … I’m going …
he told himself, knowing lucidly that it was most important to fall backwards, out of the line of fire if possible; but as he struggled to go down it was as though he were being held erect by an invisible cable attached somehow to the gallery from where the man, raising and lowering his arm in measured calm, continued to fire.

The effort to fall brought a burst of sweat streaming from his pores but even now his legs refused to obey, would not collapse. And yet, through the muffled sound of the weapon and the strange ringing of bells, his eyes were recording details of the wildly tossing scene with the impassive and precise inclusiveness of a motion picture camera toppling slowly from its tripod and falling through the unfolding action with the lazy motion of a feather loosed from a bird in soaring flight: panning from the image of the remote gunman in the gallery down to those moving dreamlike on the floor before him, then back to those shooting up behind the men above; all caught in attitudes of surprise, disbelief, horror: some turning slowly with puppet gestures, some still seated, some rising, some looking wildly at their neighbors, some losing control of their flailing arms, their erupting faces, some falling floorward—And up in the balcony now, an erupting of women’s frantic forms.

Things had speeded up but, oddly, no one was moving even now toward the gunman—who seemed as detached from the swiftly accelerating action as a marksman popping clay birds on a remote shooting range.

Then it was as though someone had dragged a poker at white heat straight down the center of his scalp following it with a hammering blow; and at last he felt himself going over backwards, crashing against a chair now and hearing it skitter away, thinking mechanically,
Down, down …
and feeling the jolting of his head and elbows striking the floor. Something seared through the sole of his right foot then, and now aware of losing control he struggled to contain himself even as his throat gave cry to words which he knew should not be uttered in this place, whatever the cost of self-containment:

“Lord, LAWD,” he heard the words burst forth, “WHY HAST THOU …” smelling the hot presence of blood as the question took off with the hysterical timbre of a Negro preacher who in his disciplined fervor sounded somehow like an accomplished actor shouting the lines.

“Forsaken … forsaken … forsaken,”
the words went forth, becoming lost in the shattering of glass, the ringing of bells. Writhing on the floor as he struggled to move out of range, the Senator was taken by a profound sense of self-betrayal, as though he had stripped himself naked in the Senate. And now with the full
piercing force of a suddenly activated sprinkler streams of moisture seemed to burst from his face
and somehow he was no longer in that place, but kneeling on the floor of a familiar clearing within a grove of pines, trying desperately to enfold a huge white circus tent into a packet. Here the light was wan and eerie, and as he struggled, trying to force the cloth beneath chest and knee, a damp wind blew down from the tops of the trees, causing the canvas to toss and billow like a live thing beneath him. The wind blew strong and damp through the clearing, causing the tent to flap and billow, and now he felt himself being dragged on his belly steadily toward the edge of the clearing where the light filtered with an unnatural brilliance through the high-flung branches of the pines. And as he struggled to break the forward motion of the tent a cloud of birds took flight, spinning on the wind and into the trees, revealing the low shapes of a group of weed-grown burial mounds arranged beneath the pines. Clusters of tinted bottles had been hung from wooden stakes to mark the row of country graves, and as the tent dragged him steadily closer he could see the glint and sparkle of the glass as the bottles, tossing in the wind, began to ring like a series of crystal bells. He did not like this place and he knew, struggling to brake the motion by digging his toes into the earth, that somewhere beyond the graves and the wall of trees his voice was struggling to return to him
.

But now through the tan and deep-blue ringing of the glass, it was another voice he feared, a voice which threatened to speak from beneath the tent and which it was most important to enfold, to muffle beneath the billowing canvas…

Then he was back on the floor again and the forbidden words, now hoarsely transformed, were floating calmly down to him from gallery and dome, then coming on with a rush.

For Thou hath forsaken me
, they came—but they were no longer his own words nor was it his own echoing voice. And now, hearing what sounded like a man’s voice hoarsely singing, he struggled to bring himself erect, thinking,
No! No! Hickman? But how here? Not here! No time, no place for HICKMAN!

Then the very idea that Hickman was there somewhere above him raised him up and he was clutching onto a chair, pulling himself into a sitting position, trying to get his head up so as to see clearly above as now there came a final shot which he heard but did not feel…